google to take on uber as its driverless car project is shelved

Google  is  backing off from manufacturing self driven cars. It had  earlier Touted its autonomous self driven cars as the technology of the future.

In the summer of 2015, Google experimented its self drive car with a blind man, Steve Mahan, had “driven”, unaccompanied, one of its Koala cars on the public roads of Austin, Texas. That trip was the world’s first fully driverless trip on public roads..

 

Google is stepping back from its " highly ambitious self driving card project. According to recent reports Google Parent company Alphabet has shelved its long-standing plan to develop its own autonomous vehicle in favor of pursuing partnerships with existing car makers.Google’s self-driving cars which had sprung up from its “moonshot division”, X labs, had become a full-blown subsidiary of umbrella group Alphabet, called Waymo. The new company, headed by X alumni John Krafcik, was assigned with " creating self-driving car technology that Google has been developing behind closed doors into a viable business for the future. However it seems Google's plan to creating self driven cars is in a limbo and have been tucked away in the deep freezer.

The One thing Waymo won’t be doing is building its own cars – a step back in ambition from the highest goals of the X labs team. “We are a self-driving technology company,” Krafcik said. “We’ve been really clear that we’re not a car company, although there’s been some confusion on that point. We’re not in the business of making better cars. We’re in the business of making better drivers Now those who have followed Google's self driven car ambition, might find this to be a  complete U turn .

Google has it first set out to reinvent " self driving , by doing away with the steering wheel and pedals however it backtracked on this after after CEO Larry Page and CFO Ruth Porat, found the original approach to be “impractical,” according to Techcrunch. 

That’s in spite of  Google’s autonomous vehicles clocking over two million miles of tests on public roads. Meanwhile a recent confidential news was leaked that Google has long been rumored to move into the on-demand car space — it offers carpooling via its Waze business — and this would bring it into direct competition with Uber.Uber began trialing self-driving taxis in Pittsburgh this year, while another, younger company, Nutonomy, is conducting similar tests in Singapore and Boston..and Google believe that" Car Hailing space" is just the right segment where it can  innovate with service operators and provide better experience to consumers

So for consumers who wanted to drive the " Google Car" you can forget about it.Apparently the best hope for someone who wants to get their hands on Google’s software looks to be Fiat Chrysler, who signed a deal with Google in May to put its self-driving tech in a small fleet of the company’s Pacifica minivans. If that deal expands into a full-blown partnership, Fiat Chrysler could be the first company selling Google tech to end users. 

One of the biggest reason why Google has putting its automated self driven cars on the backburner seems to be its insistence on pursuing full automation.“The system we have built is aimed at full autonomy, and it is therefore much more complicated than a lot of these other systems,” X labs engineer Andrew Chatham told the Guardian